


Our Dreadful Marches

by emptyque



Category: A Midsummer Night's Dream - All Media Types, Henry VI - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 - Shakespeare, Richard III - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Free Will, Gen, Innocence, Swordplay, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 06:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6227950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emptyque/pseuds/emptyque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When brainstorming unlikely crossovers, I came up with Richard III/A Midsummer Night's dream. </p>
<p>A young lord Richard feels the world is unfair and harsh, though a visiting fairy tells him otherwise. What choices did he make that led him to the path of vengeance and lust that we know so well?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Dreadful Marches

**Author's Note:**

> I follow all of Shakespeare historical inaccuracies, so Edmund is younger than Richard, Richard has visible disabilities, and participates in battles that he was historically too young to attend.

He tore through the tress, the jagged branches of the juniper bushes catching his sleeves. Behind him, his older brothers called, “Richard, Richard!” but he kept his eyes ahead of him, where the sunlight peaking through the trees shone in misty silver. The woods around him grew darker, and the calls of plump black starlings grew harsher until he could no longer hear his brother's voices. Mud grasped at his feet, trying to pull him to the ground, and after a few stumbles, he tumbled face down into the dirt.

He didn't try to stand; he just rolled onto his crooked back and began to cry. “I'm useless,” he told himself, “weak, weak, weak.”

Earlier that afternoon, his brother George had pinned his right arm behind his back, wrenching it until it hurt. Richard couldn't use his weak left arm to free himself, only flail it around in such a ridiculous way that it only made George and Edward laugh harder. George could always count on hurting Richard to get Edward's approval, but whenever Richard pinched or teased little Edmund, Edward would scold him with a “that is not princely behavior.” It was like there were different rules for different people. The world was unfair.

The air was silent except for the squawking birds. He wondered if his brothers had given up looking for him and had headed back to the castle. It was an upsetting thought. He had hoped they would keep looking for him until they were sorry.

And so he stared up at the black branches of the trees, which grew fuzzy through his tears. Then suddenly, a faced peered down at him. For a second, he thought it was Edmund, for this person had the big eyes and round cheeks of his young brother, but then Richard saw the brown, pointed beard and the two small horns curling from his head of curls.

Richard scrambled to his feet. The little man only followed Richard with his eyes, blinking slowly and calmly. 

“Who—who are you?” Richard said.

The little man raised a hand. “The name's Robin Goodfellow.” He bowed a little, but his mouth was in a sideways smirk and his voice was something sly. 

“Do you live here?” Richard asked. “In my father's wood?”

“Wrong,” he said with a laugh and suddenly leapt into a cartwheel. “You're double, double wrong.” He clicked his heels three times in the air and then landed on his feet with a triumphant grin.

Richard's fear of the stranger had already dissipated. This queer little man could never harm anybody. “I'm double wrong you don't live here?”

“Ah, you're wrong I don't live anywhere. And you're wrong, sweet lordling, these aren't your father's woods. The woods have been here before man counted days, and so have I.”

“You're a funny little thing,' Richard declared with new boldness.

“Isn't the world a funny little place?”

“No,” Richard said. “Its cruel and unfair and I hate it.”

“Oh, sweet lordling,” the little man shook his head. “Your shoulder must still hurt.”

Richard touched the muscle that his brother had so heartlessly pulled and twisted. The little man blew a pray of dust on Richard's jerkin, and as he did, the ache in Richard's shoulder disappeared. 

“How—!” he began.

But the little man answered, “There is kindness in the world, King Richard, but sometimes you have to provide it yourself.”

Dogs barked in the distance, and in an instant the strange little man turned and ran into the brush. Richard followed after, climbing over tangled roots and ducking below branches. The little man scrambled with an adept, bestial ability and soon was out of sight. 

A pack of hounds crowded around Richard when he returned to the clearing, pushing their wet noses into his hands and wagging their spotted tails. It was sunset now, and the sky between the trees glowed red. In the center of the clearing, a sleek black horse stood at attention, and its rider glared down at him with a frown that Richard knew all too well.

Richard fell to his knees and bowed his head. “I'm sorry, father.”

“Get out of that mud. You're already filthy as a heathen.”

This was a tone reserved for Richard. The deformed son—cursed.

“What makes you think you can run alone in the woods like an animal?”

“George pinned my arm and—”

“That's all? Do you think my foster brothers never roughhoused with me? Take it like a man.” He urged his horse to a trot and whistled for the dogs to follow. Richard trailed the pack.

That little man in the woods couldn't possibly be right. Kindness the world? Sure.

 

But that night, little Edmund approached him as he prepared for bed.

“I'm sorry George is so mean to you,” he said. He held the rosary around his neck as he spoke. He delicate fingers were nearly as white as the ivory beads.

Richard looked into his brother's eyes, and was struck again how much they resembled the little man in the woods, both wide and walnut shaped with large black pupils rimmed with hazel. 

“You don't need to feel sorry to me,” Richard cast his eyes to the floor with sudden embarrassment.

“But, I really am.” Edmund grabbed Richard's hand, his twisted ugly hand. It was muddy brown in Edmund's palm. “You don't deserve him being mean to you.”

But his words made Richard feel guilty instead of relieved. It made sense for George to pick on his monstrous brother, but there were days when Richard had been just as cruel to his brother the angel. No wonder Edward was more approving of George than Richard.

The brothers went to bed, and Edmund curled up against his brother, but for hours Richard lay awake, poisonous feelings eating away at his gut.

***

A sword whistled by Richard's head, but he jumped away from the strike. His own sword was already blush with the blood of the Lancaster army when he lunged at his opponent. There was a fire burning nearby, and smoke shrouded the field around them in a heavy curtain. But Richard had wolfish eyes, capable of blinking out the silt and in spot the weak point in his opponents armor, even in the dying light of dusk. The point of Richard's sword found its target, and he twisted the blade as his enemy clawed at his chest plate, begging for mercy.

Richard only shoved the body away and ran into the smoke, unafraid of anyone who might lurk there. He may have been young, but this, he knew, was what he was made of—blood and smoke.

He reached a place where the smoke had cleared. There were no enemies but the slain and a few groaning and waiting for death. Far on the hill a head, dangerously close to the wall of Sandal Castle, the battle still raged. He recognized his father's crest charging Lancaster's dog of Northumberland and Clifford, as if a mighty bull pointing his horns to yipping whelps. And suddenly pride burst in his hear, pride that his father never coddled him but rather raised him to become, as he was destined, a beast of the battlefield. 

Beneath this pride, rage grew, for the false king's army had his noble father surrounded on all sides. Richard ran down the slope, not sure if it was possible to charge the next hill in time to save his father.

In the valley, skirmishes were still going on. Richard's sword cut anyone in his path, and he paid only slight attention to the colors they wore. Soon he reached the edge of the cluster of fights. But here, a Lancaster solider stood in his way. He was a bulky fellow, his blade and helmet gone missing, and he turned with his back towards Richard as he kicked a man on the ground with the hard steel points of his shoes. It gave Richard great pleasure to slice open the man's artery as he turned his head toward Richard's footsteps. 

The man on the ground scampered to his feet. The last grasps of sunlight revealed familiar the crest of fleurs and lions, and he lifted his visor to reveal the face of brother Edward.

“Brother!” Edward said. “Oh, you shake.” Even under the circumstances, he never lost an opportunity to be the older brother.

“Certainly, I shake,” Richard said, in a voice deeper than natural, “but I shake not in fear, but in hate. Our father was just chased by Lancaster's pawns over yonder hill.”

“Lead the way,” Edward said. “Lancaster chickens can only fly so far.” 

Richard felt natural leading his brother through the battlefield. Edward may have been older and perhaps, as the saying goes, wiser, but it was Richard who was a native to this land of blood. He could trample fallen bodies as if their battle armor was soft as clover flowers, and the wafting odor of gutted horses and vomit was to him a sea breeze. All his mind was focused on his father. His goal.

Edward, by contrast, stumbled through the corpses, covering his delicate nose with a handkerchief. Richard knew Edward was handsomer, by far, but handsomeness is only valuable in days of peace. And when would those come?

As they neared the spot where Richard had last seen the Duke of York, a man in their colors came running across the fields. There was something in the man's gait that chilled Richard even before he listed his visor to expose a doleful face, fully lite by the torch in his hand. There was enough there for Richard to read his message before he began to speak.

“The noble Duke of York was slain, your princely father and my loving lord.”

Edward turned his face away to whip his womanly tears. “No more,” he squeaked.

“Say how he died,” Richard said, “for I will hear it all.”

Richard like stone while is brother moved away to where the messenger’s words could not wound him. But he felt no sadness in hearing his father had died like Achilles, as determined as the Greeks before the fortified Troy. Then Richard heard the messenger say, “The ruthless queen gave York a napkin steeped in the harmless blood of sweet young Edmund, slain by rough Clifford.”

Edmund slain? His father died as a man, with his boots on, but Edmund? A child?

Richard half expected himself to sob at this news, but instead he only felt a hardness in his twisted chest. He turned away from the messenger, from his brother, and into the blackening night.

In aimlessness he wandered toward a clump of trees under the narrow splinter of the moon. Visions of butchering the vile Clifford danced before his eyes—how he would crack open his perfect chest and squeeze his living heart, revealing in his black-eyed terror. Soon the blood-dreams spread elsewhere—to the false king and his slut wife and her surely bastard son. But they didn't end there—the messenger who dumbly witnesses the slaying without lifting a hand, even the weepy Edward. What kind of king could he even become? Better to now slit his throat and throw him to the grass, letting the purple bubble beneath his clutching hands. The imagined murders felt so real to Richard, he could almost feel fresh blood sticking between his fingers.

He lifted his hand before his face. It looked dark and moist in the moonlight. A white shape shuddered beyond his fingers. 

“Who goes there?” he shouted just as the face was beginning to take focus. When he saw the alarmingly innocent eyes, his heart seemed to beat for the first time all night.

“Edmund!” he called as he ran toward the figure.

But as he approached, he saw the beard upon the figure’s chin and the gleaming horns nested in his hair.

“You!” Richard exclaimed. “I thought I dreamed you.”

“Why, I can pinch myself to see if your dreaming,” the little man declared. “No, wait. I'll pinch _you_ to see if I'm dreaming. Oh...”

Richard was in no mood. He turned to go.

“Hold your horses!” the little man shrieked. Richard looked over his shoulder. “You never know when you might need a horse.”

The little man's voice was high and child-like, despite his ageless face, and when he laughed, as he did at the end of his joke, it brought Richard flashes of Yorkshire afternoons spent in merriment, of sunshine peaking through the Rowan berries, and of his younger brother's warm hand squeezing his own. For one brief second, these images struggled valiantly against the bloody massacre held in his mind's eye, but promptly lost against those vengeful forces, and disappeared into oblivion. Richard did not heed the man's repeated entreaties to halt, and instead headed straight for the darkness.


End file.
